remain among the most living portraitures of that exquisite but fragile form. Yet neither here nor elsewhere did Browning care to dwell upon the finished completeness of the perfect union. His intellectual thirst for the problematic, and his ethical thirst for the incomplete, combined to hurry him away to the moments of suspense, big with undecided or unfulfilled fate. The lover among the ruins is awaiting his mistress; the rapturous expectancy of another waiting lover is sung in _In Three Days_. And from the fireside the poet wanders in thought from that highest height of love which he has won to the mystic hour before he won it, when the elements out of which his fate was to be resolved still hung apart, awaiting the magical touch, which might never be given:-- "Oh moment, one and infinite! The water slips o'er stock and stone; The West is tender, hardly bright: How grey at once is the evening grown-- One star, its chrysolite! * * * * * Oh, the little more, and how much it is! And the little less, and what worlds away! How a sound shall quicken content to bliss, Or a breath suspend the blood's best play, And life be a proof of this!" But the poet who lingered over these moments of suspended fate did not usually choose the harmonious solution of them. The "little less" of incomplete response might "suspend the breath" of the lover, but it was an inexhaustible inspiration to the poet. It provokes, for instance, the delicate symbolism of the twin lyrics _Love in a Life_ and _Life in a Love_, variations on the same theme--vain pursuit of the averted face--the one a _largo_, sad, persistent, dreamily hopeless; the other impetuous, resolute, glad. The dreamier mood is elaborated in the _Serenade at the Villa_ and _One Way of Love_. A few superbly imaginative phrases bring the Italian summer night about us, sultry, storm-shot, starless, still,-- "Life was dead, and so was light." The Serenader himself is no child of Italy but a meditative Teuton, who, Hamlet-like, composes for his mistress the answer which he would not have her give. The lover in _One Way of Love_ is something of a Teuton too, and has thoughts which break the vehemence of the impact of his fate. But there is a first moment when he gasps and knits himself closer to endure--admirably expressed in the sudden change to a brief trochaic verse; then the grim mood is dissolved in a momentary ecstasy of remembrance or of idea--and the verse, too, unfolds and releases itself in sympathy:-- "She will not hear my music? So! Break the string; fold music's wing; Suppose Pauline had bade me sing!"